“Yoga does not always cure stress. It neutralizes it through increasing awareness and by changing self-perception.” – Debasish Mridha
There are times in life when we feel absolutely frustrated with everything. Nothing seems to be going right and life just seems absolutely pointless. More often than not it is the stress of our everyday lives that keeps piling up, which makes us feel a bunch of negative emotions. This negativity not only affects our mind adversely, it also affects the body leading to a number of health issues. Whenever you are feeling this way, it is essential to get away from all of it to clear your mind. Yoga retreats are a great way to de-stress your mind and help improve your life. The benefits are endless and multifold.
An Escape Away From Regular Life: Attending a yoga retreat will offer you a much-needed break from your everyday life. It is a great option to shut off from all the stressful factors and let yourself relax. What makes a retreat vacation the best choice is that unlike a regular vacation you do not have to worry about a ton of bookings, creating itinerary and planning your budget accordingly. You simply book the retreat as per the given package charges, and let the retreat take care of everything else. This is a hassle-free vacation where you can let go, without any worry.
Healthy Body for a Healthy Mind: A healthy mind resides in a healthy body. It is often seen that a number of yet-to-be diagnosed physical problems manifest in the form of anger issues, depression etc. Bad mental health is often a sign that the body is hurting. Spending some time in a yoga retreat encourages you to lead a healthy life and helps improve your health. All those yoga sessions help in the production of adrenaline, endorphins, and serotonin, which make you happier. There are several asanas, which are practiced to help improve mental health issues.
Meditation Helps in Calming the Mind: When the pressures of life become too much for our mind to handle, it gets exhausted, leading to negative emotions such as frustration, anger, hopelessness etc. These emotions, when left untreated for a while can affect mental health severely. Therefore, it is essential to take care of your mind. Meditation is a great way to soothe an agitated mind, and thus, to help offer a certain level of mental clarity. It helps untangle the web of thoughts and help sort out the situations better. Meditation helps calm the mind and offer it a better space to process.
Yoga Helps You Delve into Your Soul and Ask Important Questions: An important part of yoga retreats is soul searching. Participants are encouraged to spend their time contemplating and looking into their own souls for answers. There are several things we bottle up, or even simply refuse to acknowledge. These things that we are in denial of are often the cause of our misery, as turning your face away from a problem does not solve it. A retreat helps clear the mind to make space for such introspection. It encourages to look deeper, to ask oneself the harder questions, to ask for answers from the self. This helps in creating an environment where a person learns to solve his or her own problems without external prompts.
Helpful Professionals Can Take Away Your Worries: At times it is difficult to get out of your own head and see an issue from a detached third person perspective. This is where a yoga retreat comes to help. Retreats offer sessions with professional yogis, meditation experts and more, who are trained to aid you in reaching out to the root of your problems. Moreover, with the help of professional one can get the best benefits out of yoga, meditation and massage therapies. Often we do practice yoga at home but make small, barely noticeable errors which makes all the difference. Proper guidance can totally do wonders.
Yoga Offers You a Healthy Community: In our everyday lives, most of us are lonely. We spend our times together physically, but our stressful thoughts don’t let us bare our souls. The best part of attending a retreat is that you get a healthy community of like-minded individuals to share your soul-searching path with. While everyone’s journey is unique and different from the next person’s traversing the path together with a community makes the job easier. You can share ideas, thoughts and practice together, motivating one another through the entire course of the journey. What is even better is that you might as well end up making a like-minded friend to share the journey of life with.
Spending Time or Being One With Nature: Our modern lives are cursed to the confines of the modern concrete jungles with souls starved for a touch of nature. We spend most of our days cooped up in our offices with artificial lights or our faces stuck in front of a screen. Even after work, we return home with the stress and pressure on our minds. This not only affects our bodies and minds immensely, it also affects our relationships as we barely get to spend stress-free time. Spending some time in a retreat surrounded by nature helps clear the mind out of the unnecessary stress that our everyday lives put on us. Nature helps lift our moods, reduce anger issues and improves our relationships with people around us. A retreat vacation with family can be a major bonding experience.
Healthy Eating Habits are Inculcated: Everyday knowingly or not, we fill our bodies with a ton of harmful chemicals. Most of us end up consuming food items such as junk food, sugar, alcohol, refined flours, processed food etc, which are extremely bad for health in the long run. But that’s not all; these chemicals affect the chemical imbalance of our brain and aggravate depression and other mental health issues. Attending a retreat vacation can help cleanse your entire system, as you are served clean and healthy meals everyday. Most of the ingredients are sourced locally, devoid of harmful chemicals. Even those who eat relatively healthy with home cooked food can come back with a better diet plan.
Thus, to conclude…
Yoga retreats are seen to have excellent impacts on the body as well as mind of a person. They encourage better lifestyles and help get rid of a number of problems. Their impact on mental health is stellar as well. While it should not be treated as a complete alternative to medical treatment, it goes hand in hand, improving the effects of therapy and medication.